Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Threw them what?” asked Toby politely.

  “Piazzas and half-piazzas. The small silver coin of the country.”

  “Oh yes. You must have travelled a good deal.”

  “Indeed we have: Mr. Murchison was so devoted to it; I used to call him the Wandering Jew. Then from Egypt we went on to the Holy Land, La Sainte Terre, you know the French call it — so poetical. And we saw Tyre and Sodom and all those places, and where Cicero was killed at the brook Jabbok, and where Elijah went up to heaven, and Damascus — quite lovely! — and the temples of Baalzac — or was it the temple of Baal?”

  “Did you go with one of Cook’s tours?”

  “Indeed we did not; it would have spoiled all the poetry and romance to me if we had done that. No, Mr. Murchison took his yacht, so we could go where we pleased and when we pleased and how we pleased. Then from there we went to Athens, and on through the Straits of Messina, and saw that volcano — Hecla, is it not? — and got to Rome for Easter.”

  “Rome is delightful, is it not?” said Toby, still playing the part of Greek-play chorus. “I have hardly travelled at all.”

  “Most interesting; I quite longed to be one of those poky little professors who spend all their lives hunting for grafficos in the Christian catafalques. I assure you we had quite a Childe Harold-al-Raschid pilgrimage, what with Egypt and all, quite like the Arabian Knight. It was wonderful. Travelling is so opening to the mind; I am sure I never really understood what ‘from Dan even to Beersheba,’ meant until I went and did it too.”

  “Did you go to Naples?” asked Toby, who still wanted more.

  “Indeed we did, and saw Vesuvio in an eruction. Vesuvius you call it, but, somehow, when one has been to Italy, the Italian point-de-vue seems to strike one more. Dear me, yes! Vesuvio, Napoli — all those names are so much more life-like than Leghorn and Florence. And those queer little dirty picturesque streets in Napoli, where the Gomorrah live! I have often given myself up as murdered.”

  A spasm of inward laughter shook Toby like an aspen leaf as this incomparable lady gave him this wonderful example of the widening effects of foreign travel. But it passed in a moment.

  “So like the Nile — so like the Nile,” she murmured, as they slewed slowly through beds of water-lilies. “If you can imagine most of the trees taken away, Lord Evelyn, and the remainder changed into palms, and sand instead of meadows, you literally have the Nile. Indeed, the only other difference would be that the water of the Nile is quite thick and muddy, not clear like this, and, of course, the sky is much bluer. Dear Lily, how she enjoyed it!”

  “Was Miss Murchison with you?” asked Toby.

  Her mother settled herself comfortably in her cushions. This was more like business, and she congratulated herself on the diplomacy she had shown in leading the conversation round so naturally, via Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy, to this point.

  “Yes, indeed she was; I never stir anywhere without my sweet Lily. Lily of the valley, I call her sometimes. My precious child! You see, Lord Evelyn, she was brought up in England, and for years I never saw her once. And I shall so soon have to part with her again!”

  Toby, who had been leaning over the side of the punt, dabbling his blunt fingers in the cool water, sat up suddenly.

  “How is that?” he asked.

  “Oh, Lord Evelyn, you nearly upset the boat! These punts are so insecure! Only a plank between us and death. You see, I can’t expect her to live with me always. She will marry. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and the same applies to a woman. I would not have her remain single all her life in order to be near me,” said Mrs. Murchison, with a deep altruistic sigh.

  Toby gave a little laugh of relief.

  “Oh, I see. For the moment I thought you meant that — that something was already settled.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Murchison; “the dear child is not so easy to please. Half London has been at her feet. But dear Lily has nothing to say to them. She sends them empty away, like the Magnificat.”

  Mrs. Murchison sighed.

  “You are not a mother, Lord Evelyn,” she went on, “and you cannot know all that is in a mother’s heart, though I am sure you are delightfully sympathetic and understanding. I tell you I hardly sleep a wink at night for dreaming of Lily’s future. I want her to marry some Englishman, of course. Some nice pleasant man out of the titled classes. She was born to be titled. I often shut my eyes when I look at her, and say to myself, ‘Some day my darling will go into dinner before her own mother.’ She has had the opportunity many times, and I have wondered lately whether my dearest has not someone in her eye — I should say her heart.”

  “I wonder,” said Toby, with marked indifference.

  “So like the Nile,” said Mrs. Murchison diplomatically, giving it to be understood that the conversation was still quite general. “But the mysteries of a maiden’s heart, Lord Evelyn!” she sighed. “Lily takes after me; as a child, I was so mysterious that nobody thought I should live.”

  “Miss Murchison is not delicate?” asked Toby.

  “Dear me, no! most indelicate. Her health never gave me a moment’s anxiety since she left her cradle. But she is very reticent about some things, and very thoughtful. When I was a child I used to fall in love a hundred times a day; it may have been Vanderbilt or a postman, and I used to put down their initials in a little green morocco pocket-book; but I never used to tell anyone about it, just like Lily. But you can see by her forehead how thoughtful she is, like Marie Antoinette. Doesn’t Tennyson speak of the ‘bar of Marie Antoinette’? She has it most marked above the eyes.”

  Toby’s ignorance of “In Memoriam” was even less profound than Mrs. Murchison’s knowledge of it, and he only murmured that he seemed to remember it, which was not true.

  “Thoughtful and pensive,” said Mrs. Murchison. “Dear child! how she looked forward to coming down here! And so gay at times. And never, Lord Evelyn,” said Mrs. Muchison very earnestly, “has she said an unkind word to me.”

  By this time Toby had already turned the punt round, and was propelling it deftly back towards the lawn.

  “Yes, if I could see her nicely married to some such man,” said Mrs. Murchison, growing bolder. “I should be content to lie like some glorious Milton in a country churchyard. Dear me, how lovely the river is, and so like the Nile! Well, I suppose we must be going back; it should be near tea-time. I have so enjoyed my little excursion with you, Lord Toby — I beg your pardon, Lord Evelyn; and what a pleasant chat we have had, to be sure!”

  And the good, kind, excellent, worldly woman beamed at Toby’s brown face.

  Toby never wasted time in making resolutions. Instead, he went and did the thing; and now he walked cheerfully up to the group on the lawn with his coat on his arm, and inquired if anyone had seen Miss Murchison.

  “Because perhaps she would like to go for a bit in the punt,” he explained.

  She was not there; vague people had seen her vaguely, “some time ago”; and the advent of tea made him wait, not because he wanted tea, but because his chance of finding her was better at a well-defined centre.

  The rest of the party was spending Sunday afternoon in various orthodox manners: Lord Comber was abstaining from a pile of yellow French novels he had brought out, Kit was sleeping peacefully with her mouth open in a long deck-chair, Jack was throwing sticks into the water for the spaniels, and Lady Haslemere was in her bedroom (a recognised Sunday resort, like a public garden). But tea brought everyone flocking together, like eagles to a carcass, and among them came Lily.

  Toby had not seen her come out through the drawing-room window; her step on the velvet of the grass was noiseless, and it was not till she was close to the table that he looked up. Then their eyes met, black eyes and blue; and so chance a meeting, a thing which had happened a dozen times before in the course of a meal, seemed strangely to disconcert each. The most simple of all changes had come over Toby; Mrs. Murchison’s words had fired his inflammable material �
�� it was all ablaze. And that beacon must have shone from his honest open eyes, for Lily saw the change that none other saw, the private signal flying for her; and when, soon afterwards, he lounged up to her, and asked her if she would care to go out in the punt, as it was cooler now, she knew, so she thought afterwards, what was coming.

  She assented, and the two went down over the close-shaven lawn to where it was moored.

  CHAPTER XI. MR. ALINGTON OPENS CHECK

  Kit, like most people who possess that master-key to immense enjoyment of life, namely, a ravenous, insatiable appetite for pleasure, had always a vital instinct to put off as long as possible anything which was unpleasant. She usually found plenty of delightful things to do every day of her life; indeed, with her tremendous joie de vivre, almost everything she did was delightful, and if there was something not delightful to be done, as a rule she did not do it. In this complicated hurly-burly of life, it is a great thing to be able to simplify, as in the tutor-ridden days one used to simplify the huge vulgar fractions which covered the page, and turned out in the end to be equivalent to zero. Kit’s methods of simplification were really notable; she cut out everything which looked as if it would give trouble, and did not care in the slightest degree about the result. And if you do not care about the result, life, like vulgar fractions and the wicked, ceases from troubling.

  But occasionally, so cruelly conducted is this world, she was driven to take odiously disagreeable steps, for fear of the speedy and inevitable disaster which would attend their omission. There were also certain prophylactic measures she used habitually to take, just as one goes to the dentist to avoid possible toothache in the future. Under the latter head came such small affairs as bazaar-openings and tedious “Grundy” dinners; also the yearly visit to Jack’s uncle, who was a Bishop — a grim ordeal, but efficacious. They gave one a firmer stand, so to speak. It would have argued a shocking lack of worldly wisdom to neglect such simple little things, and whatever Kit lacked, she had an admirable amount of that. But the avoidance of unpleasantness in the greed for the pleasures of the moment led her constantly to put off distasteful things, in the same way in which one puts off the writing of letters, blindly hoping that if they are left unanswered long enough they will, in a manner of speaking, answer themselves. This charming result is often attained, but sometimes it is not, whereby the children of Eve are disconcerted.

  The tiresome baccarat incident had now been unanswered rather more than a fortnight, during which interval Kit had not seen Mr. Alington. She told Jack that the mine-man was rather too much for her. Besides, she had introduced him to a hundred houses; if he could not swim for himself now, he never would. But when on the morning following this Sunday, as Kit, figuratively speaking, looked over her old letters to see what had to be done in the last week in London, she came upon the baccarat letter, and read it through again, hoping that she would feel that it had by now answered itself, for she had given it time. But though she was sedulous in taking a favourable view of this and all other matters concerning herself, she came to the disheartening conclusion that it had not. There was clearly only one of two things to be done — either give it more time and another chance to answer itself unaided, or answer it herself at once. And, as a wise and perhaps a good wife should, she determined to consult her husband about it, wishing that she had done so before.

  The confidence between the two was, in a certain well-defined area, of an intimate kind. There were, no doubt, certain things which Kit did not tell Jack, and she on her side felt that there might be developments in the Alington scheme, for instance, into which she would not be permitted to enter. She did not resent this; everyone may have his own private sitting-room, where, if one knocks, one may be refused admittance. It was wiser then not to knock, and certainly there were things in hers which it was not her intention to show Jack. But apart from these few exceptions, Kit always told Jack everything, especially if she was in difficulties.

  “It produces such peace of mind,” she had said once to Alice, “to know that no one can tell your husband worse things than he already knows about you. How some women can go on letting their husbands remain in ignorance about their bills and other indiscretions, I can’t conceive. Why, I should have to ask Jack every evening what he had learned about me during the day. And that sort of revelations come much better from oneself. It wears,” said Kit thoughtfully, “the guise of candour, and also possibly of regret.”

  The two women practised great freedom of speech with each other, and Alice replied frankly:

  “Sometimes I think you are a clever woman, Kit; at other times I feel sure I am wrong, and that you are the most abject of fools.”

  “I suppose you mean that I seem to you an abject fool now,” said Kit. “Why, please?”

  “Because you tell Jack only the things that don’t really matter. The things which if he heard from elsewhere would really make a row, you don’t tell him.”

  “Ah, but those are the things which nobody can tell him,” said Kit, with her customary quickness, and more than her usual penetration.

  This conversation occurred to her mind to-day, when she determined to ask his advice about the baccarat. The only question was whether it, too, came under the head of what nobody else could tell him. If it had been someone of her own set who had seen, or whom she suspected to have seen, the little faux pas of the hundred-pound counter, it would no doubt have come under the head of the things incommunicable. To Tom, Toby, Jack, Lord Comber, it would have been impossible to repeat such a thing. But one could not guess what ideas of honour a wild West Australian miner might have. To repeat such a thing about a woman was contrary to the code in use among her associates, and a good thing, too, thought Kit, strictly confining the question to the particular instance, and not confounding issues by a consideration of honour in general.

  Even after the lapse of a fortnight the thought of that evening was a smart and a mortification. Jack was going to entrust the ship of his fortunes to the wild man who sang hymns, and played a harmonium, for aught she knew, and her really laudable desire to have some hold, some handle over him, had ended in this débâcle. It was not certain, indeed, that he had seen, but Kit could not but admit that it was highly probable. After all, honesty was the best policy, and she determined to tell Jack.

  He had gone up to town by an early train, and Kit, who disliked getting up early almost as much as she disliked going to bed early, followed him later. He was out when she reached Park Lane, and it was close on lunch-time when she heard a cab drive up. Next moment the butler had announced Mr. Alington. The two looked just like brothers.

  “Good-morning, Lady Conybeare,” he said very smoothly. “Your husband asked me to lunch here, as we have some business to talk over. I was to give you a message, if he was not yet in, asking you not to wait lunch for him. He might” — Mr. Alington appeared to ponder deeply for a moment— “he might be detained.”

  This meeting was intensely annoying to Kit. She had told Jack that she had had enough of the mine-man, and it was very tiresome to have this tête-à-tête, and quite particularly disagreeable after their last meeting to see him alone. However, she put on the best face she could to the matter, and spoke with familiar geniality.

  “Oh, Jack is always late,” she said. “But why he should think it necessary to ask me not to wait for him is more than I can say. I suppose you have been imbuing him with business habits. Jack a business man! You have no idea how droll that seems to his wife, Mr. Alington. Let us lunch at once; I am so hungry. Kindly ring that bell just behind you, please.”

  Mr. Alington sat still a moment, and then rose with deliberation, but did not ring.

  “I am lucky to find you alone, Lady Conybeare,” he said, “for the truth is, there was a little matter I wanted to talk over with you.”

  Kit rose swiftly from her seat before he had finished his sentence, and rang the bell herself. It was answered immediately, and as the man came into the room, “Indeed; and what is that?” she
said. “Is lunch ready, Poole? Let us go in, Mr. Alington. I am always so hungry in London and elsewhere.”

  Kit could scarcely help smiling as she spoke. She had no intention whatever of talking any little matter over with Mr. Alington, especially if it was the one she had in her mind; and she could not help feeling amused by the simplicity of the means by which she had put the stopper on the possibility of a private talk. She wished to hold no private communications with the man. She had done her part in launching him, for the convenience of Jack; she had given him to understand, or rather given other people to understand, that he was an ami de la maison, and she washed her hands of him. He was very kindly going to make Jack’s fortune in return for benefits received, but he had distinctly said that the arrangement was one of mutual advantage. It was give and take; he was on the same level as your grocer or bootmaker, except that those tradesmen gave in the hopes of eventually taking, while Mr. Alington took as he went along. At the best he was a sort of cash-down shop, and Kit did not habitually deal with such. She did not consider him dangerous, and she was so well pleased with her own adroitness that she very unwisely determined to drive her advantage home.

  So, as he followed her through the folding-doors into the dining-room, “What is the little matter you referred to?” she asked again, feeling perfectly secure in the presence of servants in the room.

  Mr. Alington closed his eyes for a moment before he took his seat, and murmured a brief grace to himself. He opened them a moment afterwards with a short sigh, and Kit’s riposte to his thrust did not seem to have ruffled or disconcerted him in the least.

  His broad butler-like face was as serene as ever.